Operating characteristics of a superconducting DC circuit breaker connected to a reactor using PSCAD/EMTDC simulation

The DC system has less power loss compared to the AC system because there is no influence of frequency and dielectric loss. However, the zero-crossing point of the current is not detected in the event of a short circuit fault, and it is difficult to interruption due to the large fault current that occurs during the opening, so the reliability of the DC breaker is required. As a solution to this, an LC resonance DC circuit breaker combined a superconducting element has been proposed. This is a method of limiting the fault current, which rises rapidly in case of a short circuit fault, with the quench resistance of the superconducting element, and interruption the fault current passing through the zero-crossing point through LC resonance. The superconducting current limiting element combined to the DC circuit breaker plays an important role in reducing the electrical burden of the circuit breaker. However, at the beginning of a short circuit fault, superconducting devices also have a large electrical burden due to large fault currents, which can destroy the element. In this paper, the reactor is connected to the source side of the circuit using PSCAD/EMTDC. After that, the change of the fault current according to the reactor capacity and the electrical burden of the superconducting element were confirmed through simulation. As a result, it was confirmed that the interruption time was delayed as the capacity of the reactor connected to the source side increased, but peak of the fault current decreased, the zero-crossing point generation time was shortened, and the electrical burden of the superconducting element decreased. © 2021, Korea Institute of Applied Superconductivity and Cryogenics. All rights reserved.